Little Oak Review
Little Oak was founded in 2007 by developers and graphic designers of the Mac community. They currently advertise they host over 400,000 accounts. Their office is located in Torrance, California and all of their support and maintenance is operated in-house with zero outsourcing. In fact, they are currently hiring technical support representatives at the time we wrote this review.
Little Oak Pros
They found a niche in supporting the Mac-based community. They support RapidWeaver-based websites will full support of uploading and transferring to Little Oak web hosting.Little Oak Problems
The ordering processing is a bit jarring because it switches website themes. The fonts, colors and font- size changes giving the impression the user has left the site to order elsewhere. The pricing is a bit expensive for what is offered.Little Oak Shared Hosting Review
Little Oak offers three shared web hosting plans and also include a full upgrade path to VPS Hosting and dedicated servers. As for the shared hosting plans, as you can see in the image they are:
- Sapling Cloud – 5GB disk space, 50GB bandwidth. $80/Year or $6.67/mo
- Habitat Cloud – 15GB disk space, 500GB bandwidth. $160/year or $13.33/mo
- Chestnut Cloud – 25GB disk space, 1TB bandwidth. $320/year or $26.67/mo.
Each plan includes unlimited MySQL databases, a free site builder, host unlimited websites, $100 in advertising credits and many other features that are essentially standard with all the web hosts we’ve reviewed.
Regarding the site builder, it is advertised as Mac Compatible that offers 450 templates to choose from, 3 pages free to be created on the standard plan, guestbook creation and more. There is also an upgrade to SiteBuilder Pro that allows you to create up to 40 pages of content for your website and provides access to additional features including more template options.
Customer Support Review
Little Oak customer support website content leaves a lot to be desired. Currently, their FAQ system consists of 35 entries, all of which, when you click take you to different pages on the site. This can be fixed by placing all of the content on the same page and the implementation of anchors to drop the user to the right question and answer as needed.
The company blog appears to be updated monthly with the last blog post added almost 2 months prior to the time of this review. Their Knowledge Base found in their footer loads completely empty for us (as shown in the picture above).
The live chat system appears to be enabled and accepting input from customers. It took them 25 seconds to activate the chat session where I was greeted and asked for my questions.
Overall, their website needs a lot of attention to it. It would appear they need to hire someone to manage and add lots of content to their support section to increase trust with potential customers looking to join.